YouTube vs. Vimeo: Which Video Platform is Best for Your Business?

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:21 David: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of WP the Podcast, brought to you by WP Gears. I’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:36 David: Today, we’re going to talk about Vimeo vs YouTube, which should you use and why for video hosting. Tim, why would I even want to use a platform like Vimeo or YouTube and not just host my videos on my own website?

00:52 Tim: Yes, that is a great question. It all comes back to bandwidth. If you have a website and you’re serving webpages, and you obviously want those webpages to load quickly, you don’t want to bog down your site with heavy MP4 video files, nor do you want to take up the space on your server as well. So it’s never a good idea to put the videos directly on your hosting account. It’s best to essentially outsource that bandwidth to platforms that specialize in it. So, Vimeo and YouTube being the two most popular. We’re going to kind of contrast basically what we believe to be the best reasons to use each one, because there’s kind of different use cases in our opinion.

01:38 David: Absolutely. And first of all, we’re going to basically cover two platforms. We’re going to talk about YouTube and Vimeo, and they’re both two of the most common, well-known video hosting platforms out there. There are other options that we may touch on slightly, depending on what your needs are and stuff, but these are the two big ones for the most part. We’ll kind of give you our opinion on when you should use each one.

02:03 David: The first one we’re going to talk about is YouTube. YouTube is great. It’s the second largest search engine in the world. I highly encourage you, if you’re producing video content, let’s get it out on YouTube. Unless it’s restricted content, YouTube is a, they do have a premium platform now, which allows you to do some of the things that Vimeo does. But Vimeo’s kind of been in that privatization, restricted content space for a long time. But I would highly encourage you to, if you’re producing video content, get it out there on YouTube. It’s the second largest search engine in the world. It’s fantastic for getting traffic to your website and stuff. So if you’re putting out tutorial videos, free videos, videos that you want to be indexed and stuff with the search engines, put them on YouTube. This is your place.

02:57 David: YouTube has a lot of fantastic marketing tools also built into it. So they’ve come a long way. The YouTube creator studio is pretty badass. Lots of vloggers, there’s lots of people making insane amounts of money on YouTube these days, because they’ve built up a brand, they’ve built up an audience. And if that’s the route you want to go, I highly recommend you go on YouTube. If you want to put out free content that gets indexed with the search engines and stuff, YouTube’s the route you want to go.

03:29 Tim: Yeah, absolutely. And so, on the flip side, if you have videos that you don’t want to be out there for anyone to find and consume for free, you want to kind of essentially lock down your content, then Vimeo is definitely our choice for that. Vimeo allows you to do private videos, which is perfect for any type of online course. In fact, David and I, we host all of our course videos on Vimeo. What that allows us to do is, they can only be embedded on our pages within the members area of the course. So people can’t take those links and share it or put it on their own website or anything like that. Vimeo allows you to choose which domain names that you want that exact video to be embedded on. It essentially gives you full restrictive rights to your own content.

04:30 Tim: It’s perfect, and it’s very affordable, too. For less than $100 a year, you get, I think it’s 250 gigs worth of storage. That’s the cheapest plan, and then it goes up from there based on your needs. But if you have some sort of paid content, some sort of membership site or an online course, which is obviously the most popular, then it obviously is well worth the money and it pays for itself.

05:00 Tim: So yeah, we highly recommend Vimeo for any type of paid content, anything where you need to lock it down and not make it out there and open to the public.

05:08 David: Yeah, and I kind of want to just briefly touch on the settings of each of these platforms. Like I said, YouTube has the creator studio now. So if you want to build up a brand and a channel on YouTube, for example, and you decide to start trying to monetize what you want to do, YouTube’s great for that. You have built in in-screens, you’ve got annotations, you have full control over what you want to put over your videos.

05:36 David: What I mean by that is, you don’t have to do a lot of post-production in-house to do all of this stuff. YouTube’s got it built in. So if I want to say, “Hey, go check out my friend Tim’s YouTube channel,” I can have that pop up on the screen whenever I want it to. If I want to promote some of my other content that I have, I can put that in there. If I want to ask people to subscribe and like and comment, it handles all of that stuff.

06:06 David: Vimeo has some great settings beyond just privatization. They allow you to group certain videos, categorize them, and then they go into a deep dive of settings of things that you can do. Like Tim said, one of the examples of, “Make it to where this video only shows on this website and nowhere else in the world.”

06:32 David: So it won’t matter if somebody gets the link. If they’re not on your website viewing that video, they are not going to see it, because it is not going to play from Vimeo. It’s only going to play on your website and stuff. There’s a lot of powerful, extremely awesome features that Vimeo has as well. It’s really cost-effective. We use it for our courses, and we love it. We also use YouTube for our businesses and stuff, because we put out a lot of good free content, and we want our products to get indexed and stuff.

07:04 Tim: Yeah. One more quick tip on YouTube, if you do have a video, something free that you’re putting out there and you want people to find it, don’t forget to have some sort of link in the description that’s going to bring people back to your website. As David mentioned, YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world. A lot of people will go to YouTube when they’re trying to figure out how to do something, and so you want to bring them back to your website with some sort of call to action or … I’ll put my tutorials on there, but the tutorials always have some sort of a text-based portion with sample code or something to download, so they have to go back to my website to get that. You want them on your website so that they can be exposed to your brand, your products, and they can get pixeled, so you can retarget them, all that fun stuff.

07:50 David: Absolutely.

07:51 David: All right, so we hope this has been beneficial, Vimeo versus YouTube for video hosting, and when you want to use what, why, and where. I probably said that wrong, but you know what I mean.

08:03 David: Tomorrow we’ve got another great topic, the best landing page building tools. Tim? Until tomorrow, we’ll see you then.

08:12 Tim: Take care. Bye-bye.

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